Beast Mastery Bible 3.0 - Page 26

Eliirion · 11/26/08, 3:11 PM

I see it a little differently. I think any fight that is roughly a multiple of 3 (+~15 seconds) in length will have this spec will do extremely well. I actually botched my timing on Patchwerk last night because I used Readiness too early assuming the fight was going to last longer than it did (in a 3.5 minute fight I should be able to BW 5 times). One thing that hasn't changed from TBC is that whomever uses the most cooldowns tends to do the most DPS. Readiness + Longevity ensures you'll be using your cooldowns the most. There will be mana issues on longer fights, obviously, but as long as you use Viper during the dry spells between each BW you aren't wasting optimal DPS time.

I also found that on fights such as 4H (and likely Heigan, etc.) Readiness is even more powerful. If I only have 40 seconds of DPS time before I need to move again, I need to do as much DPS as possible in that time. Having 36 seconds of BW over the 40 or so that I am hitting a horseman easily pushes me over other DPS'ers. Considering I can do that to two horsemen, and get a solo BW on at least one other horsemen, how does that not easily dominate?

flimflam · 11/26/08, 3:20 PM

I dont have a WWS (i KNEW i forgot something). I only have a couple screen shots of recount from fights.

My build was this: 54/12/5 except for the 1st fight i had 2/2 gfft and 0 invig. though neither fight did i run oom or have to pot.

Patchwerk 1: For this fight i DID NOT use serpent sting and had glyph of the viper, steady shot, and beastial wrath. (i believe Rhayne in this fight was 50/21 while on PW2 he was the same spec as me.)

Patchwerk 2: For this fight i DID use serpent sting and had glyph of the HAWK, steady shot, and beastial wrath. (i messed up and didnt "click for next pet" in this screen shot, i used Filter a devilsaur on earlier bosses but for this one i used my cat TheCheat)

I need to remember to combat log next weeks fights. (we might do 10m this week and ill try to log those if im able to go)

Some observations from 2 weeks of naxx 25:

Hunter's are doing some crazy damage early on. we have 3 hunters and would often be top 3. On Sapphrion i was able to do 1.4 million damage while 2nd place did 1 million and that was another hunter.
The scorpid can do some good damage. another hunters scorpid would usually out damage our cat pets. (i could try mine on 10m pw)
When i tested a devilsaur, he was only able to MATCH the damage of a cat. While when i would use my own cat it would do MORE than that same cat. (we do have a feral druid who tanks/dps)
Volley is owning my guns durability and with so much AE in trash.. i had to repair 2x just because of it breaking or almost breaking :|
Call of the wild seems to be STACKING with other Calls of the wild. I've seen the buff 2x AND saw my rap drop as each buff dropped.

Some personal opinions here:

Im not totally sure how good the 51 pt talent is.. part of me says it sucks because all the pets are useless to me but part of me loves the extra points. Im able to get Heart of the phoenix which i was able to use on sartharion, 4h, sapphrion, and kt. It also lets me grab charge and 2 into resists. I dont know if its the talents or not but my pet is able to stay alive in just about every fight that doesnt insta gib him like a void zone. I think im going to try a 50/*/* this week.

Serpent sting uses almost DOUBLE the mana of steady shot.. and on longer fights where i have to switch to AotV, I wonder if im losing damage. cause it sure "felt" like i did.

Originally Posted by noth

Any tips on getting your pet down from the platform,

What i do is dismiss my pet when the 2 guys are around 15%. Make the jump and Call pet while running to thaddius.

Mattaos · 11/26/08, 5:03 PM

Originally Posted by Eliirion

I see it a little differently. I think any fight that is roughly a multiple of 3 (+~15 seconds) in length will have this spec will do extremely well. I actually botched my timing on Patchwerk last night because I used Readiness too early assuming the fight was going to last longer than it did (in a 3.5 minute fight I should be able to BW 5 times). One thing that hasn't changed from TBC is that whomever uses the most cooldowns tends to do the most DPS. Readiness + Longevity ensures you'll be using your cooldowns the most. There will be mana issues on longer fights, obviously, but as long as you use Viper during the dry spells between each BW you aren't wasting optimal DPS time.

I also found that on fights such as 4H (and likely Heigan, etc.) Readiness is even more powerful. If I only have 40 seconds of DPS time before I need to move again, I need to do as much DPS as possible in that time. Having 36 seconds of BW over the 40 or so that I am hitting a horseman easily pushes me over other DPS'ers. Considering I can do that to two horsemen, and get a solo BW on at least one other horsemen, how does that not easily dominate?

I was a bit skeptical of the 50/21/0 Readiness build at first because the spreadsheet showed it as lower DPS compared to other builds. Eliirion, you bring up some really good points and the WWS you posted was excellent. Now, I am wondering if it is possible to produce even more DPS from this build by going 1/3 Longevity and 3/3 Cobra Strikes, since it appears that it is still possible to get 5 BW procs in under 5 minutes.

0m00s Beastial Wrath
0m00s Kill Command
0m01s Rapid Fire
0m18s Readiness
0m19s Beastial Wrath
0m19s Kill Command
0m21s Rapid Fire
2m09s Beastial Wrath
2m09s Kill Command

3m01s Rapid Fire Up
3m18s Readiness Up

3m27s Bestial Wrath
3m27s Kill Command
3m28s Rapid Fire
3m45s Readiness
3m46s Bestial Wrath
3m46s Kill Command
3m47s Rapid Fire

Asmolicious · 11/26/08, 6:03 PM

I've been toying with a few builds and already respecced about 10 or so times since hitting 80.

One of the big problems is that BM builds have to be tested in a fully raid buffed environment and at present my fellow raiders wouldn't be best pleased if I pulled out a fine light crossbow for patchwerk. Spreadsheets, while a great resource, often don't quite reflect reality which is a slight on Blizzard's slightly buggy coding rather than the author of the spreadsheets.

WWS does feedback some interesting information though.

Invigoration regenerates a lot of mana hovering between JoW and Replenishment in terms of effectiveness. It has often made the difference between having to viper and staying in dragonhawk, or at the very least reduces my viper time significantly.

People were asking for some data from 25 man so I thought I'd post my WWS.
Wow Web Stats

Unfortunately the WWS report is a bit off in some places and doesn't include my pet in some of the fights though he was used for all.

This was a Naxx clear in similar gear to that which I am currently wearing minus 3-4 pieces of gear. Unfortunately there were no other hunters in the raid to compare against.

edit: As a note this is without the steady shot glyph as we are still waiting for someone to discover it on Hyjal.

KraxisSingular · 11/26/08, 11:24 PM

So the Beast vs Hawk issue isn't solved yet for which is primary.

However, I think everyone can agree that going into Beast for BW (and what not) is the best thing to do. The pet scaling 50% better for the duration means a great deal to the benefit of Beast, especially since we pop trinkets and Kill Commands.

Also, since Beast appears to be adding too much benefit at this time (what is it 21%?) I have actually plopped down 5g for a Glyph of Aspect of the Beast. Now the big one pops up. Would that possibly be worth killing the Serpent glyph over... If the odd scaling of Beast continues it might just.

Dantastic · 11/27/08, 12:29 AM

I think we may be at a place where there isnt a cookie cutter BM spec in anything like the BC sense. Wheras in the last expansion, the talents almost picked themselves in the end, with a clear set of dps focussed talents all important and all accessible.

But it seems at the moment, there is such a huge range of options - the 51 pt talent, for example, while perhaps not leading to any dps increase at all, in some fights will mean the difference between a pet surviving or not, and clearly that will make a bigger impact to a BM hunters dps than any differing raid build.

The readiness spec clearly gives incredible burst and is very effective in short fights, but not as mana efficient and missing the extra pet talents that can goto surivability.

Personally I love this situation, especially with dual specs coming soon. I think theres potential for several specs, focussing on prolongued mana intensive fights, fights where pets will struggle to survive and short nuking fights. At the moment im liking a more heavily BM focussed build for better mana regen, as Im finding a fair few fights where half the raid is dead (or kicked from server:S) and I need to keep going, possibly without any mana batteries alive in raid, for longer

Quick · 11/27/08, 8:31 AM

Originally Posted by Eliirion

As to the 50/21/0 spec I am pretty sold on it.

This is Patchwerk from last night. I was still wearing 5 pieces of Sunwell gear and a mix of heroic epics / Naxx 10 epics during that parse. I am quite sure that it will be the dominant spec going forward.

while that is an extremely good parse given your limited wotlk upgrades, how did you manage to pull off two bloodlusts in a three minute fight?

Iroared · 11/27/08, 9:16 AM

I was wondering how to use pet abilities, rake and claw, most effectively.
Ideally, the cat should apply rake continuously (its okay to apply it after every cooldown since its close to duration) and claw on every GCD (if energy allows it).
Now, how to achieve this?

If we just enable autocast, Claw works fine but Rake is hardly used (e.g. it was used 30 times during a heroic run).

I tried taking them off autocast and modifying my spam macro to /cast Rake and /cast Claw. I could see rake on the target for like half the time (not sure why, when I looked in pet abilities rake was always on cooldown even if the buff was not on the target, can it possibly miss that much)? Claw on the other hand was not applied that much which worries me. Moreover, this is perhaps a bug, abilities like Kill Command and Cobra Strikes do not affect manually casted pet abilities: I could see the KC/Cobra buff on me with 3 charges but those charges weren't used until the ability expired.

So generally, enabling autocast on Claw does not allow Rake to proc, and disabling the autocast (and casting it manually/through a macro) does not work with KC/Cobra Strikes. I would like to see a solution to this.

It would be very nice if autocast AI was improved to allow DoT abilities to have more priority and proc only when the debuff duration was up.

Har · 11/27/08, 9:38 AM

Originally Posted by Iroared

I was wondering how to use pet abilities, rake and claw, most effectively.
Ideally, the cat should apply rake continuously (its okay to apply it after every cooldown since its close to duration) and claw on every GCD (if energy allows it).
Now, how to achieve this?

If we just enable autocast, Claw works fine but Rake is hardly used (e.g. it was used 30 times during a heroic run).

I tried taking them off autocast and modifying my spam macro to /cast Rake and /cast Claw. I could see rake on the target for like half the time (not sure why, when I looked in pet abilities rake was always on cooldown even if the buff was not on the target, can it possibly miss that much)? Claw on the other hand was not applied that much which worries me. Moreover, this is perhaps a bug, abilities like Kill Command and Cobra Strikes do not affect manually casted pet abilities: I could see the KC/Cobra buff on me with 3 charges but those charges weren't used until the ability expired.

So generally, enabling autocast on Claw does not allow Rake to proc, and disabling the autocast (and casting it manually/through a macro) does not work with KC/Cobra Strikes. I would like to see a solution to this.

It would be very nice if autocast AI was improved to allow DoT abilities to have more priority and proc only when the debuff duration was up.

There are a few points here- first is that if rake was always on cooldown, then it was being used properly, and it would have been used more than 30 times. Next, rake costs 20 focus and claw costs 25, so if both are on auto-cast, rake should go off every time it's off cooldown, and claw should be dumping focus during the cooldown. If your build is starving your pet of focus (not having GftT, for example), then you might see some weird stats at the end of fights.

Edit: I've created a thread to discuss just pets: Pet management

Eliirion · 11/27/08, 12:05 PM

Originally Posted by Quick

while that is an extremely good parse given your limited wotlk upgrades, how did you manage to pull off two bloodlusts in a three minute fight?

I'm pretty sure that's WWS being wrong. It also says Volley in there, and I sure didn't Volley on Patchwerk.

flimflam · 11/27/08, 12:15 PM

Quick question regarding the Scorpid pet.

Was it changed with WOTLK in that you should pop your trinkets and damage/ap cool downs before the first poison application? I thought i read that the bonus doesn't last anymore after those cool downs fade?

Edit; Found a couple posts asking my same question. Heres an answer i found and putting it in here to help with anyone else searching.

WotLK Talents & Abilities Discussion

I did a bit of testing with lvl 70 Scorpid Poison just before shutdown and I just wanted to add, so there's no confusion and because its easy to miss this info, that Scorpid Poison dot damage reflects the CURRENT pet AP at time of tick and not the Attack Power it had at the start of the stack.

Testing was done with myself in AotViper (not attacking) first observing the damage range of a full stack of Scorpid Poison.
I then swapped to AotBeast (still not attacking) and noticed a consistently significant increase in the tick damage over the damage with AotV up.

Har · 11/27/08, 12:51 PM

Originally Posted by flimflam

Edit; Found a couple posts asking my same question. Heres an answer i found and putting it in here to help with anyone else searching.

WotLK Talents & Abilities Discussion

I searched for a while, and that's the only test I could find. It's a good question, and I'd also like an answer. I found many people explaining that as of 3.0.3 with the slight nerf to the poison damage their scorpids were still out damaging cats and devilsaurs on single target long fights. Unfortunately, none of them clarified whether they were front end loading their AP.

If anyone has any data for us, please post it in the new Pet management thread.

Aelua · 11/27/08, 4:20 PM

I know there are currently all kinds of BM specs floating around, but has anyone taken a look at the pros/cons of spending points in Focused Aim?

There has been some discussion between me and some of my hunter friends regarding this particular talent, and I'm currently trying to figure out whether it's more beneficial to spend the three talent points to pull myself closer to the hit cap or to spend the points elsewhere. I've been pulling decent DPS for my gear, and I love not having to worry about the hit cap, but I wonder if it would be better to gem for straight up hit and respec for other talents.

This also brings up the topic of gear; we aren't really certain at this point how much hit we'll be seeing on our gear in the future. Who knows if hunters may be spec'ing in and out of Focused Aim depending on their gear.

I just thought I'd throw the topic of this particular talent out for discussion. I'm currently putting together a list of things I need to test on Patchwerk/dummies (gear/specs/rotations) so I can hopefully come back here with some numbers for discussion relatively soon.

Laxxz · 11/27/08, 5:12 PM

Originally Posted by Aelua

This also brings up the topic of gear; we aren't really certain at this point how much hit we'll be seeing on our gear in the future. Who knows if hunters may be spec'ing in and out of Focused Aim depending on their gear.

Well seeing as how our 10/25 man Tier 7 Loot has not 1 point of hit on it, I'm personally not expecting any on our next tier of gear, I wouldn't be surprised if it did, but I'm betting otherwise. I have been running 53/18/0 for a little while now, and have been getting decent DPS for my gear (2000-2400), but after reading flimflams post I'm trying out his spec, 54/12/5 with 3/3 FA and 1 GftT and 1 in invigoration. I do like the mana regen from invigoration, but I feel like I see alot of bite/monstrous bite crits with no mana return, so once I get a little more hit (or I may drop 1 in imp tracking for 2/2 invigoration) I'll drop down to 2/3 FA and try out 2/2 invig for longer fights.

Quick · 11/27/08, 5:41 PM

[quote=Laxxz;990105]

Originally Posted by Aelua

This also brings up the topic of gear; we aren't really certain at this point how much hit we'll be seeing on our gear in the future. Who knows if hunters may be spec'ing in and out of Focused Aim depending on their gear.QUOTE]

Well seeing as how our 10/25 man Tier 7 Loot has not 1 point of hit on it, I'm personally not expecting any on our next tier of gear, I wouldn't be surprised if it did, but I'm betting otherwise.

The chest has 44 hit on it, which is quite a bit. You just have to gem/spec for hit, or find rings/neck/cloaks/weapons with hit, similar to what you had to do if you wanted to be hit capped early in TBC. its the first tier set, its not supposed to be that great, or else there wouldnt be any room for improvement in additional sets.

also, it seems like it is now better to gem for AP once hit capped, rather than agi, even with kings due to the increase in pet dps it generates.